Peter Cook: Los Angeles played host to America's architects--with a little help from their friends.

At the end of four hectic days, it ceased to surprise me that it was the intrepid Yung Ho Chang that we'd spotted down the other end of a Santa Monica restaurant. When we joined him, he explained that it seemed neat to stop off in LA on his bi-weekly commute from his day job as chair of architecture at MIT to his office in Beijing. Meanwhile my Rumanian-Israeli-Venezuelan LA 'local' companion proved already to be networked into the rest of his party. We had anyhow just left a garden filled with visiting Brits, 'local' Brits, visiting editors, New York editors, 'local' writers and international busybodies who don't mind mixing a good Tequila with the backdrop of thoughtful detailing, nifty features and a Californian sunset.

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This was a tiny segment of the reputed 18 000-person chatter that surrounded the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Convention in Los Angeles. Not that I met too many people who had actually sat through the sessions. Better than that--they'd had plenty of naughty, tweaky, plotty, reconciliatory confabulations. Some of them were highly public, as when a line of us sat being grilled by Eric Moss on our views on language, culture, jargon or politics, prompting some classic lines from Wolf Prix--almost of the vintage power of his 'architecture must burn' stuff. Some responses were genuine: Thom Mayne conscience-searching in front of 800 people, and a reminder of the refreshing clarity of former Architectural Review staffer Frances Anderton's brain, egged on by the showbiz awareness of her two-year-old moppet of a daughter.

It was great to be in an architecture school, SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is head), that responds to the challenge with three (or was it four or five?) exhibitions on the go, serious Margherita-mixing, and an atmosphere that could even get me to confess publicly my teenage hobby of collecting medieval castles.

Like many others, I had been flown in to promote something-in my case the simultaneous launch of Buro Happold's LA office and the Audi Design Studio on the West Coast. Such high-end Euro infiltration has nothing on the intriguing news that both UCLA and USC are likely to be headed-up by, respectively, a Japanese and a Chinese professor. Remember my comments in this column only eight months ago? My! It's happening even faster than predicted.

Wait a minute, though, what do we really mean about this infiltration of European or Asian cultures? At least eight or ten times (more often with no cocktail at all in my hand), I fell into a discussion of who was building, reviewing, pursuing, combining, teaching, or prospecting in places other than their own. This created a somewhat different dynamic from that which I had suggested in the Audi Studio--tracing a path from Adolf Loos to Rudolf Schindler to John Cage to Co-op Himmelblau, or Christopher Isherwood to Reyner Banham to Frank Gehry to Greg Lynn--which was intended to add coherence to the LA scene. Perhaps the new reality was exposed by all these folk agreeing to pass through a single city as merely a mark on a card; just as those made by a blushing (but scheming) debutante at a ball, where the few moments with the shy young man with the handsome looks had to be measured against the strategy and symbolism of who dances the Last Waltz.

Los Angeles is highly agreeable and still retains a measure of an openness that makes it similar to London but different from New York or Paris, where ganging-up is a bore and hiding-away a respectable option. At the downtown Standard Hotel, however, 'openness' was interpreted as excruciating security paranoia capped by the blandest collection of party-poopers and taste-free drinks, only enlivened by coloured light-bulbs that swam in your glass! Our gang agreed that the planned new architectural magazine that it celebrated was doomed to failure.

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How different from the conversations that I did enjoy--each with an undeniably creative Angeleno: Marcos Novak, and then Neil Denari. Each talked about drawing and teaching, challenging and exposing one's own prejudices without either of them needing the garden parties, the big sessions or (maybe sadly) occasions to meet each other.

Certain cities do have more than their fair share of thinking, acting, creating, discriminating architects. London and Los Angeles certainly, Tokyo and New York inevitably. The excuse of a conference (or any other contrivance) will inevitably want to take on the buzz of such a place. But it may only be buzz and little more, the local design community feeling no need to regroup, or to adjust its historical allegiances.

So another city or a concept parallel to that of 'city' has to be added to the list. That of the accumulation of meetings, seances or magic moments that Yung Ho was able to articulate: 'We carry the sum of these meetings together in our heads,' he said, and for the two of us our mutual city happened to be Nanning-Melbourne-Boston-London-Santa Monica--and what a city that is! But better still, what a conversation! Yet in its way, it is also the product of the accumulated backgrounds that are collected. So roll over you old city smoking-rooms.